How many names—and which names—should you buy for your marketing database? I wish more marketers would be more strategic, asking themselves questions like these about their data needs. When management is pushing for more results and faster results, it’s tempting to just pick up the phone and work with the first data provider that comes your way, with minimum or no specs. But then, you find yourself with loads of data— probably half of which is outside of your target market—but still no data strategy or revenue targets. And you wonder why your conversion rates are so low. If additionally, you invested in a data cleansing tool-—which I highly recommend—you find yourself paying for cleaning and updating useless records.

This kind of shotgun approach to list buying is both rarely effective and very expensive. But data and analytics do not have to be hard.